


Feathers and Glass

by inlovewithnight



Category: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Genre: Gen, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-08
Updated: 2012-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 06:13:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/427820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She still trusts the magpies most.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feathers and Glass

She still trusts the magpies most.

"My darlings," she calls them, "my guardian angels." Her loving and loyal citizens build a dovecote when they rebuild the palace; she sets every poor delicate soft-bellied thing free and fills the cage with magpies.

(The priests tell her she must not call them angels. She remembers the forest, remembers every tree, every blade of grass, every flower and fairy and beast pulsing in time with her heartbeat. She feels an odd twist in her stomach, the sense that something she has always believe is not--quite--right, before she smooths it away and bows her head. She swears to be pious and good. She says three Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.)

The dovecote bleeds black feathers. Her Huntsman opens the doors and lets the birds rise up, streaming into the sky. Snow White gathers the feathers between her fingers, clinging tightly, gasping aloud with fear that her darlings will not return, or that something _else_ will rise from the scattered pieces they left behind.

"They love you as you love them, my Queen," her Huntsman says, watching her. His eyes are always sharp and careful both. She wants to cover them with her hands. "They will come back."

"What if everything comes back?" she asks, without meaning to, knowing she shouldn't. His eyes flash fear and she turns away. "Forgive me."

"Ravenna is gone," he says. 

_And I was dead_ , she thinks, twisting the feathers in her hands. _Yet here I am._

**

William finds her in Ravenna's tower, looking at the mirror on the wall.

No one has touched it since Ravenna died. The surface is already beginning to tarnish.

"Will you ask the servants to polish this?" She reaches to touch the bronze, gasping as William catches her wrist before she makes contact.

"Don't touch it," he says, his fingers pressing over her pulse. "It's evil."

"An object can't be evil. Only people can."

"It has dark magic."

"The magic was in her." Snow thinks that is true. She has no way of knowing for sure, though. She looks up at the mirror and wonders.

William is still holding her wrist, his fingers warm and tight. Not painful; he would never hurt her. She accepts this as a fact of her reality, like wind, like tide, like the magpies watching over her since she was born.

His father is dropping hints for a marriage, a noble alliance. They are the last of their generation of noble blood still alive. It is their duty to marry, and she has no objections. Marrying a childhood friend who has held her in his heart for all these years is more than a princess--queen--could ever hope for.

"I'd like to have it polished," she says. "It's too beautiful to allow to rot away."

He lets go, smoothing the sleeve of her dress as he does. "Yes, your majesty."

Power is as trivial as it is immense. The hide of the great stag under her hand was no more than this, and no less.

**

She stands under the sky in the courtyard and waits for the magpies to come back. She has seen them, flitting by outside the walls, above the turrets, out of her reach. They are punishing her, she assumes, for trying to bind them. She understands her error. She would kneel to them, if that was what they wanted. She would apologize.

But they are birds, and don't care about those things. All she can do to regain their favor is wait.

She walks the perimeter of the courtyard, flexing her hands at her sides, then stops as the sunlight glitters off a shard of glass caught between the paving stones and the wall. It's cold against her skin when she picks it up, so cold she bites her lip in surprise.

Glass that's dark at its heart, dark all the way through. A shard of the black-glass soldiers.

Ravenna made them. Ravenna's magic gave them their life. This is Ravenna, in the glass in her hand, built into the darkness at its heart and throughout. 

She remembers the life pulsing under her hands in the forest, the feeling that she could _reach_ and _pull_ , that she could mold it and move it with her hands. She can't feel a heartbeat in the glass, not now, but if she focused, if she tried--if she held it up before the bronze mirror and let Ravenna's memory call out to this last scrap of Ravenna's making--

The magpies circle and scream. Snow closes her eyes and lets the glass fall to the ground. She will have to have the courtyard swept, again.

**

As long as the magpies return, she will stay. If they ever leave her, she will follow them, from the walls of her palace to the farthest corner of the sea.

They are her truth, her compass. They are the voice of her land.

She doesn't tell anyone, of course. Not her Huntsman, who will serve her until his last breath; not William, who will love her no matter what. Certainly not her people, who see her as not only a sovereign, but a touchstone. A living element of faith.

They all need to believe that she is here forever, that she is bound to _them_. They do not want to think about the transience of beauty, the fragility of glass. She won't force them to see it, unless the time comes that she must take up her wings and leave them behind.


End file.
